Tuesday, April 24, 2012

A former student of mine, Matt, came up to me with an interesting question about the nature of commercial art and artistic freedom and integrity. He ran into an intriguing situation in which the creators and consumers of a video game series came into conflict.

Basically, the whole
controversy is based on this epic Space Opera game called Mass Effect. It spans
3 games, and is an open RPG, where you make choices which directly impact your
personal experience and roll over through each game. Choices you make in the
first game impact what happens in the second and third, so no fans play through
is the same, though obviously the overall narrative arc follows a generally
similar path. Most of the differences in the story are thus details. Most
notably, primary characters can die, and various alien species may be allied
with you or not based on your in game decisions, which also impact the strength
of humanity in that pantheon.

The overall plot is
pretty straight forward for an epic space opera following a standard format,
and honestly, the quality and depth of the characters and supporting world is
what holds it up. To give you a quick synopsis for reference--Giant
robotic alien spaceships called reapers threaten space
faring civilizations with destruction every 50,000 years; hiding in deep
space until the galaxy is ripe for "harvest." The galactic
civilization forms around a nexus of "mass relays" which
instantaneously transmit matter to another relay. These artifacts were designed
by the reapers and left so that civilization evolves along the pathways they
choose. The role of the protagonist is to garner the various races of the
galactic community to fight the threat.

The end of the series
was terrible beyond words. Basically, the entire series you've been dealing with
themes that synthetic and organic life can coexist. If a player has met certain
levels, they can make peace between an organic and synthetic race that have
been battling for 300 years. But, in the last five minutes of 140 hours of
game-play and story, a new character appears, informs the player that synthetics
and organics are doomed to kill each other, and that the reapers were
created by this character to solve this by killing organics before they create
new synthetics which will kill organics.

Basically, in the last
minute, the entire series was summed up in the phrase "synthetics will
kill organics no matter what, so I made a race of synthetics to kill organics
before they make synthetics that will kill organics"

On top of that, we have
tons of errors in lore and basic narrative processes. Characters appear in
places they cannot possibly be based on where they had been
minutes before and act contrary to how we have understand them,
player choice is stripped from the player despite the 140 hours solidifying it
as the main drive. The protagonist cannot argue with the new character, who
then presents 3 choices, each equally terrible--control the reapers and die;
destroy all synthetic life, including the synthetic allies that you befriended
and whose rights you fought for; or forcibly merge all synthetic and organic
life (how this even works is never mentioned). The only in game representation
of the different choices is (I kid you not) a change in shade in the ending
cinematic. The ultimate player choice is what is your favorite color: red blue
or green?

Obviously the fans were
outraged. They had become engrossed in the story and the characters, but it was
all stripped from them in the last five minutes. Immediately, the community
demanded a new ending that was "fixed." In less than a week, the
movement raised $80,000 for a charity that buys video games for kids in
hospitals. Bioware's (the producing company) response was to call the fans
"entitled whiners" and to stand by the "artistic integrity"
of the writing team.

Fans were even more
incensed by this. Complaints were filed to the Federal
Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau for false
advertising. The BBB found in favor of the consumers: the advertised claim that
the choice of the individual resulted in huge implications and wildly different
endings was false advertising. Bioware, under increasing pressure, agreed to
release free content by sometime this summer to "clarify" the
endings, without changing the actual choices.

What it ultimately boils
down to is: A video game was
advertised as an epic conclusion that highlighted the choices made by the
player, but the choices the player made did not impact the end result in any
significant way. The story of the game
abandoned character traits, thematic elements, philosophical ideas, and even
basic logic in literally the last 5 minutes. The last five minutes
also contain innumerable lore errors and basic narrative failings that
completely destroy the suspended disbelief the player has established, ruining
the entire 140 hours of game-play they had invested.

The question to draw
from this then, is--what is the relationship between consumer and artist when
the artist has produced commercial art? If the art does not fulfill basic
expectations, can the consumer (who in this case paid $60 for the game) demand
an ending that fulfills the promises or at least matches the narrative quality
of the series? Or are they simply "entitled whiners" who are
subverting the artistic vision of the writers?

Anyway, I thought this
would be something you'd have fun dissecting. It certainly is a question that's
been driving me crazy.

So, when an artist has created a community of consumers for his art, does he then forfeit some of his artistic freedom to the expectations that he has created? Is there a fundamental difference in terms of integrity for commercial and non-commercial artists?